During President Islam Karimov’s 24-year reign of terror in Uzbekistan, his government has imprisoned thousands of political opponents and people who practice their religion outside the state’s strict rules; many of them have been tortured or brutally killed—even, in a case famously documented by Human Rights Watch in 2002, boiled alive. Karimov also refuses to take responsibility for the 2005 massacre of several hundred peaceful demonstrators by Uzbek forces. Nor has the United States held him to account; instead, Washington annually funnels some $500 million in transit fees to Central Asian states that host parts of the Northern Distribution Network, the land route into and out of Afghanistan—including Uzbekistan, through which the majority of NDN-bound U.S. supplies pass. In her 2011 trip to Uzbekistan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton struck a friendly tone, welcoming “a great opportunity that we have to try to help develop democracy here in Uzbekistan.” Few others would say that: Even Karimov’s daughter, in the midst of a bizarre family feud, alleged in December that her father’s “scary” security forces had tried to poison her.

This tiny Gulf country crushed its local Arab Spring in March 2011, unleashing hundreds of troops and armored vehicles on mostly Shiite protesters, dozens of whom were killed and many more injured, tear-gassed and jailed. Activists—around 2,000 of them still in prison—have even accused the government of torturing them with electric cattle prods. To the Sunni Al Khalifa monarchy, often hailed as Arab moderates by the West, the unrest was but a devious plot unleashed by Shiite Iran. President Obama has spoken out against the abuses—but done little else, while continuing to sell arms to the wealthy Gulf country, some of which were used against demonstrators. Not coincidentally, Bahrain hosts the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet at an 80-acre base undergoing a $580 million expansion.

Once a pariah state most often compared with North Korea, Myanmar over the past few years has made a dramatic transition from decades of junta rule; its new president, Thein Sein, shed his general’s uniform, freed political prisoners, scaled back press censorship and opened the country’s economy—not to mention releasing from house arrest the Nobel Prize-winning dissident Aung San Suu Kyi, who now holds a seat in the country’s parliament. Washington has been Myanmar’s chief cheerleader, with Obama and Thein Sein making a historic exchange of visits but the transition, while laudable, is by no means complete. After rolling back sanctions, the Obama administration is now exploring a closer military partnership with Myanmar, even as the country’s security forces brutalize ethnic and religious minorities—just like the bad old days.

10. Azerbaijan

Bling in Baku

“Azerbaijan’s investment in the energy sector holds the promise of further integrating Azerbaijan into the world economy and raising living standards for your nation and its citizens,” Obama said in 2011. Indeed, Azerbaijan rakes in some $20 billion in oil revenues each year, but Aliyev’s government has played it fast and loose with all that cash: The details of the state oil company’s partnerships with private companies are not public, making it impossible to track exactly how the oil money is spent. What’s clear is that the capital, Baku, is booming, with the government spending $6 billion a year on extravagant architecture projects. Hundreds of middle-class homes have been razed in recent years to make way for these gleaming structures, many of which bear the name of Aliyev’s strongman father and predecessor, Heydar, including an airport, sports complex and new spaceship-like arts center designed by starchitect Zaha Hadid.

So what if it’s small? Azerbaijan is both awash in oil and gas riches and located in an extremely geopolitically useful spot for the United States—a former Soviet state that’s willing to stand up to the Russians, and a key listening post for neighboring Iran. The man in charge is Ilham Aliyev, a former playboy who inherited his position from his dictator father. Aliyev has aimed to please not only by steering oil contracts to American companies, but also by providing troops for the wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq and allowing the U.S. military to move goods through Azerbaijan en route to Kabul. One leaked diplomatic cable compares Aliyev to two sons in The Godfather: Michael, the dutiful favorite, representing Aliyev’s pro-West foreign policy, and Sonny, the impulsive hothead, representing his domestic repression. “[T]his Michael/Sonny dichotomy complicates our approach to Baku and has the unfortunate effect of framing what should be a strategically valuable relationship as a choice between U.S. interests and U.S. values,” the cable reports. While U.S. officials often dutifully call on Aliyev to respect human rights, it’s clear the United States has made its choice. In a 2010 visit, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton lauded Azerbaijan’s “tremendous amount of progress” toward democracy while acknowledging “a lot of room for improvement.” That was charitable: Last year, voting authorities posted the results of Aliyev’s reelection victory a day early (just a “test,” they claimed).

11. Ethiopia

Ethiopia is a democracy at least in name and has had Western (and Chinese) companies salivating at its recent double-digit GDP growth. But longtime strongman Meles Zenawi, who died in 2012, and his successor, Hailemariam Desalegn, have leaned on a sweeping anti-terrorism law to stamp out opposition, imprisoning journalists, activists and politicians who dare speak out against the government. Ethiopia has made itself useful to the United States, though, invading Somalia in 2006 at Washington’s behest and disastrously fueling a rise in terrorism that prompted another intervention in late 2011. Rights groups accused the U.S.-trained and -equipped Ethiopian military of war crimes in stomping out an ethnic rebellion in 2008, but Washington has only hugged Addis Ababa tighter: In 2012, Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest states, was the top sub-Saharan African recipient of U.S. aid—and the seventh country overall—raking in some $707 million.

Nearly 40 years after the end of the Vietnam War, that conflict’s most articulate critic—John Kerry—now finds himself spearheading an unlikely reconciliation effort, as the United States seeks to pull Ho Chi Minh’s heirs into the American orbit. The sight of U.S. warships docking in Vietnamese ports has become oddly familiar in recent years, much to China’s consternation. But communist Vietnam remains one of the world’s most repressive states, making this particular Asian pivot point politically tricky. Secretary of State Kerry summed it up best in December, when he described the feeling of revisiting the place where he had once fought: “Weird, and it’s going to get weirder.”

One of the poorest and most backward states in Central Asia, Tajikistan has cashed in on the U.S.-led war in neighboring Afghanistan. And now, with illicit drugs surging to as much as one-third of Tajikistan’s economy, it is perhaps drug traffickers who have benefited most from tens of millions of dollars in U.S. investment in the country’s infrastructure; the very roads that feed America’s war machine allow smugglers to carry heroin out of Afghanistan. The drug lords have formed a mutually beneficial partnership with high-level officials in the Tajik government, which is responsible for widespread detention and torture of political dissidents. President Emomali Rahmon, a colorless ex-Soviet apparatchik, has been in power since 1992. According to a State Department cable published by WikiLeaks, “Rahmon and his family control the country’s major businesses, including the largest bank, and they play hardball to protect their business interests, no matter the cost to the economy writ large.”